Posted
by
timothy
on Friday October 08, 2010 @04:11AM
from the top-that-with-sparklines dept.

jamie tips this mind-blowing data visualization concept from (naturally) data visualization researcher Michael Ogawa, who explains that it was inspired by "this XKCD comic. It represents characters as lines that converge in time as they share scenes. Could this technique be adapted for software developers who work on the same code?"

Very often it is difficult to see at a glance whether a project is mature and stable or just dead. It would be interesting to see whether this type of visualisation can tell you at a glance how healthy the project is. If so it would be nice to have this view on sourceforge, etc.

xkcdsucks and xkcdexplained are the only reasons to read xkcd. For this comic I recall thinking, "I wonder which one will mention Minard?" But xkcdsucks went one step further, noting that comic 540 (by its "Napoleon's forces" label) almost confirms that Munroe had previously seen Minard's excellent diagram.

This is in fact the exact strategy that Kurt Vonnegut used to use to plan his novels. He used to discuss it in terms of Slaughterhouse 5 where Dresden was a large black bar that most of the characters didn't emerge from.

As is implied by the word swimlane, the diagram shows several horizontal 'lanes', these represent individual people or organisations. Then a flowchart is overlayed onto the swimlanes. Whenever an action is performed by a organisation, the flowchart box for that action is in their lane.This shows for instance who is responsible for what in a process.

I believe that if, say, LOTR was to be shown as a swimlane. You could have the characters that come into contact with The Ring as lanes across the diagram. And a line moving from one lane to the next as the ring passes ownership but going from left to right as it stays in their grasp.

The diagrans in the article show, in many ways, the opposite. The lanes come together and separate over time showing who is in contact rather than who is doing what.